Confluence. Your own way to stay individual while being connected with your team/company

Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell

Disclaimer: This article is NOT about “Confluence” software by Atlassian. It’s more about the psychological view of work/life balance problem.

You can benefit from reading this article if:

1. You feel no passion waking up every morning and going to work;
2. It’s difficult for you to build relationships with your team;
3. Your job makes you stressed or frustrated often;

This article is an alternative view of the situations described above. It contains some psychological insights about how to change your situation for the better. I’ll be using some terms from the theory of Gestalt therapy.

In Gestalt therapy, the term Confluence is described as:

CONFLUENCE….Boundaries are very diffused when we are confluent, as confluence indicates that the individual feels no boundary at all between himself and his environment, when he feels that he and it are one…

Every person meets confluence in his life right after being born. The mother needs to fulfill the baby’s needs. That’s why she needs to be in confluence with a baby. She feels a physical and emotional connection. The confluence for her can be followed by such phrases as “We’ve eaten” “We’ve slept” as she and a baby is a whole and not two different individuals. This process is natural and helps the baby to survive. However, it also has downsides. It can continue forever if the mom and the baby don’t go through the natural separation process from each other when they start recognizing themselves as individuals. In this case, the mom will continue treating 30 years grown-up as a baby, babysitting him. Even though he still doesn’t learn how to be financially independent and lives with her.

Confluence has a unique side effect that we can benefit from. It brings us unlimited motivation and the belief that we’re almighty. Remember the last time you’ve worked at night or without weekends because the product you love needed to release a new exciting feature that will make it even better. Remember what you’ve felt? I bet it cost you almost nothing. Moreover, you were excited that you were a part of this effort! From my personal experience, I remember the situation when I didn’t feel hungry during the day for a couple of months because I had so many new and interesting things to learn.

How does it work? It’s not magic. If you’re in confluence, some of your natural feelings are suppressed. So you can do whatever is important for someone else even though you don’t need/like it personally at the moment. You can even die for someone or something.

So confluence is always about good and bad simultaneously. And it’s essential to understand how to ‘use it’ properly and when. Further, we’ll talk about how confluence influences our work-life balance.

So how to understand that you’re in confluence with the company you work in?

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

• You don’t want to return to work after a long vacation. During the vacation, you probably had a chance to do something that really drives you, something you really liked to do. You can now feel the difference between doing something you really want and like to do versus doing something that you do for many other reasons.
• You can’t figure out where’s your own decision and where’s your company’s / team’s decision. Try asking yourself if the decision made is something you will decide on your own or you feel comfortable to agree with what others have said.
• You overtime a lot. First of all, don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that overtiming is something unacceptable. It’s ok unless we do it totally consciously. Of course, there’re situations when I want to stay and work more because I want to master my skills and become a better professional. Try to find your own ‘reason’ why you overtime. If you find it difficult, welcome to the confluence;
• You’re afraid to ask/request something from the management / or your team/peers. Asking for something for yourself usually highlights you. It makes you different, the one who thinks differently from others. Doing so, you might feel exposed and vulnerable. Remember the feeling when the teacher is asking the class if they understood the topic, and you didn’t. Remember how difficult it is to raise the hand and be different. Here it works the same;
• You can’t allow yourself to disagree with your company/team. There’s another version of the sign from above. Disagreement makes you different from others. Try to think if you ever allowed yourself to challenge a team’s decision, to provide your own opinion that is totally different from what was decided;

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So, imagine you understood that you’re in total confluence with the company/team. So you might have a reasonable question — ‘Should I quit?’.

Let’s try to figure out the answer together. First of all, let me repeat myself. There’re advantages of being in confluence. Being in confluence with a team/company makes you connected. It makes you a part of the whole. You can’t build relationships with your colleagues without being in confluence with them. You can’t enjoy the feeling of being a part of a great product/company without being in confluence with it. Just can’t.

Another question is, ‘Is that any risk to stay in confluence forever?’. I would say there’s. In a nutshell, it can:

• Lead to burnout due to waste of energy on something that doesn’t have an emotional return (you don’t do what YOU really like to do);
• Lead you to take a ‘victim position’ when you’re upset about things that happened TO YOU at work that you took no responsibility for;

So what should we do?

There’s always a healthy balance between being in confluence and feeling like an individual you can maintain. It will allow you to enjoy the advantages of being in the confluence, and enjoy your personal freedom of choice, freedom of being a person with his own feelings and needs.

Is there a way to exit the confluence if needed? The answer is ‘yes.’ Imagine that going into the confluence is a process of getting closer when two objects are moving towards each other. So there’s the reversed process of decouplings. It’s called differentiation. As there’s a force that drags two objects into the confluence (let’s call it gravity), there should be a force that can pull one object out. And such force exists.

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I’ve interviewed several people with different stories of the confluence with their jobs. And all of them have referred to a natural ‘aggression’ as a tool of stepping out. I believe more things can be used to create energy that will oppose confluence. In this article, I would concentrate only on one.

So natural ‘aggression’ is the energy that helps an individual to fight over its own boundaries. It’s the energy that helps us to get things as we want them to be when they go wrong. This is the energy that emerges in us when we disagree, and we want to change things. Of course, we have to use it in an appropriate/smart way. We can choose to use it by shouting at our colleagues, blaming them. Or we can suppress this energy at work and then bring it home and then spill it over our relatives/couples/friends. Or we can suppress this energy and turn it inside ourselves. In this case, it might manifest into some psychosomatic disease.

Or…We can use it in an ecological way when everyone wins. Allow ourselves to be the boldest ourselves we can ever be. Allow ourselves to feel different. Allow ourselves to disagree. And share that whenever it’s true. So you can:

• Express yourself when you disagree;
• Let others know the borders you don’t want them to cross when it’s important for you;
• Let others know what\how you want things to go and take responsibility for it;

Conclusion

We’ve talked about confluence, how it can influence us, and the balance between staying confluent and being an individual with our own needs and feelings.

I wish you all to stay emotionally healthy and enjoy being in confluence while feeling yourself an individual.